I love piracy and seeders

How do you mean? The lawsuits, or something else?

I felt the same, but there's just things that's forever popular. I don't mind not seeding, if there's already 200+ doing it.

But for all the niche things, and for personal favorites, I'll seed for a loooong time.

For popular stuff I stop seeding when I've uploaded 10x the download size. For other stuff I keep it uploading forever.

Soulseek is a P2P file sharing system centered around music in particular. It's pretty direct. Unlike a torrent where you'll have multiple seeds for a single source, you're connecting directly to other individuals for the content. It generally operates under the expectation that you're also sharing something, and some users may opt not to allow downloads to people who do not also allow downloads from themselves. The downside to this system is you may need to wait for that person to come online before you can start a download, while with a torrent, other seeders can fill that gap.

It's survived as a pretty big platform for music hoarders to source hard to find material, but it's so dead simple to use and it has a quick and reliable search. Nothing secretive about it, it's basically just another P2P network that has more in common with Napster than the Pirate Bay

Use nicotine as the client instead. It's arguably more user friendly and also stuffed with features. Most nix distros have it in their repos. You just need to share stuff on Soulseek(primarily music though some people share films as well).

Soulseek is filled to the brim with music, especially flac versions of songs.

It's pretty easy to use. The only challenge for newcomers is setting up port-forwarding, since some users won't share their collection with people who have their ports blocked. You don't have to open your ports or share your music collection, but it is leeching and considered a dick move by some.

I can rly recommend it, especially with Nicotine+

You’ll find the rarest shit on SLSK.

After a quick search there’s a package for my Linux distro

I recommend using the Nicotine Plus client. It's more user friendly and open source

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "artificially locked in order to keep it rare"?

I don't know about the latter half of your statement, but my main reason for its use is pretty simply just that there's more music available, and it doesn't take all the time it normally would to get invited to a good music tracker. If anything, specialized Torrent trackers that could offer the same volume of music are a much bigger pain go deal with.

From what I understand the (Japanese) band official wrote the band name with the Latin alphabet. The band had a slight international presence in France if I'm not mistaken with their 2nd last album getting a limited CD release, so maybe a pirate site catering more to the Japanese or French crowd might have yielded better results in hindsight.

I dunno if I would consider the band that launched gackt as niche but I might be living in a bubble of my own making haha

Private trackers are not worth it at all. Getting into main stuff is way too hard and open signups are pure luck. Even people who used top tier private trackers for over a decade now openly admit they wouldn't bother with it if they were starting from scratch today.

I used to be on Demonoid and some other JAV trackers but they shut down and I'm too lazy to bother with waiting to join another. Never really was into music enough to track (hah!) a private tracker and honestly I think it's not in the spirit of torrents. But I appreciate the recommendations nonetheless :)

I want to utilise my old rasp pi and/or 10400f “old” matx pc with all parts. I need some kind of central home server for storage, jellyfin, seeding torrents and some other self hosted cool things but I am still figuring out where to physically put it even and what kind of case and too many decisions left me paralysed to be honest. As I also want it to look cool. Maybe I will just try to score some used server. In other words I want to do everything and so I don’t really have anything yet but some day it will kick in and I will do it in two days probably

A good general suggestion. The WAF I follow are 'reasonable' expense, reasonable form factor, and a physical investment. I floated the idea of a VPS and that's when I learned of the third criteria. It is what it is.

I just started on this 8tb HDD so it isn't very full right now, I could raise the ratio limits. But, I worry about filling the HDD and part of me worries about 100s of torrents on an n100 doing other things. So I'm keeping the habit from my pi4+1TB days of deleting media behind us and keeping the torrent count low.

I justify it as self managing though: popular Isos are on then off my harddrive fairly quickly, but the ones that need me will sit and wait until they hit the ratio of 3 however long that is. I would like to do "3 + (get that last seeder to 100%)" but I don't know how/if it's possible to automate through prowlarr.

Decent but not in size. Not for those long seed times with big sizes.
500gb at best at the price.
And good luck getting seedboxes with unlimited upload